Proper Usage
by CoffeeWench
Summary: Susan, her habits, and what has become a personal demon.  General until changed.  The ideas wouldn't leave me be.


Terry Pratchett owns this all; I'm just playing around with the ideas it spawned.

I expect a few more chapters or related one-offs. Cheers.

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><p>"Susan." It was Twyla, leaning warily against the hall side of Susan's door.<p>

It took an exercise of willpower to lift her eyes from her book about dragon lore – Lady Sybil had lent it to Susan last week – and turn her attention to Twyla without glaring.

The seven-year-old pursed her lips and wrinkled her brow, hoping to convey adult-like, nonchalant concern.

"There's a ghost, you know," she said. "In the parlour."

Susan knew that; the bloody thing had been trying to form for more than a fortnight. It must have got itself together at last. Being Death's granddaughter gave her a few special … abilities. One such was to see what others couldn't, spirit-wise; so, the mass of pseudo-soul had wafted about the Gaiters' house, tightening into a human-sized twist without interruption. After last month's Hogswatch adventure, Susan wasn't at all inclined to dig into Granddad's business again, so she'd turned a blind eye until one of the normal humans could see the ghost.

She closed the book on one index finger and asked in tones of great patience, "And what's it doing?" Danger to Twyla and Gawain would necessitate action, of course. If it were merely being annoying, Susan could probably frighten the thing off with The Voice – another hereditary talent from Granddad – but if ghosts didn't get an entertaining reaction, they tended to find someone else to bother.

To Susan's astonishment, Twyla, instead of answering, shrank into herself, the aloofness falling from her like a shed cloak. She scuttled into the room and clambered onto the bed with Susan and sat against the young woman's side as if trying to meld with her. Susan's brows arched high under the fringe her black-and-white hair. This was a bit overdramatic, even for Twyla. The girl was even _trembling_, and Susan's arm went around her without pausing to ask its owner if it were okay.

"Susan, it's one of the monsters."

A taken-aback pause preceded the reluctant question: "Which one?"  
>Twyla wrapped her arms around Susan's torso and whispered into her collar, as if to keep the ghost from hearing her, "<em>The one you killed on Hogswatch.<em>"

The little lightning impulses that oscillated between the soft, squishy patch in her head that was more spinal cord than brain and the bit that did most of the thinking blew her pupils wide and triggered a brief bout of hyperventilation before she could suppress it. Susan mentally tore after the kneejerk reactions, wrestled them to the floor, thumped them good and sent them to do more good as anger. The familiar swelling fizz of rage released her frozen limbs, and with a nostril-flaring inhale, Susan rose to her feet.

"What's it doing?" she asked again. Her voice was starting to take on echoes of The Voice, and her hair was determinedly wriggling free from the low bun into which she'd bound it.

Twyla, still on the bed but slowly coming out of her cower, answered, "Just looking. He's being creepy and _looking_ at everything."

"Looking?"

"Really close."

Well, _that_ gave no clue; that was rather the man's _modus operandi_ in life. That meant nothing. When his _modus_ was in full _operandi,_ people tended to meet her grandfather in droves. Susan went from frown to glower, tugged at the hem of her waistcoat, stalked to the fireplace, snatched up a poker and strode from the room. She thought, riding ever higher on a mushroom-clouding wash of rage, _May as well go in, crossbows a-firing, then._

So, with Twyla trailing behind like the good show-seeking Ankh-Morporkian she was, Susan stiffarmed her way into the parlour and snapped, "Out."

A figure that was still foggy around the edges was standing with its back to the fireplace, clearly waiting for her. Mismatched eyes brightened under a mop of pale hair and over a demented smile.

"Hi, Susan!" chirped Jonathan Teatime.

The anger was still ballooning upward fast enough to nearly lift Susan from the floor. She dragged Twyla behind her with one arm and pointed at the door with the poker.

GO. AWAY.

And the figure blurred around the edges, like a breeze passing through the heavy blanket of fog the river Ankh threw over the whole city. Teatime's eyes went just a touch wider, and he said, "_That's_ an interesting sensation," in his odd tenor.

Then, he blurred again, but this time as if someone had blown through the rising blue smoke of a lit, undisturbed cigar. The smoke drew a trail through the air for half a second, an afterimage that followed the path Teatime took between the fireplace and two inches from Susan's face.

That squishy, mostly-spinal-cord part of her brain made Susan take two steps back and got the poker up and through the ghost in about the same amount of time. The poker slashed through him, not even leaving a ripple. Her Voice had had more effect. And, more because her arm was stuck on the upswing than because she thought another strike would do any good, Susan brought the poker back down, this time making sure to draw a line from the crown of Teatime's head to his meat-and-vegs.

"That won't work here," he murmured in that voice that was _way_ more discomfiting than his chirp, quoting Susan from their time in the Tooth Fairy's castle. He narrowed the space between them again, adding with a bright smile, "You can't hurt me; I'm already dead!"

"I'll come up with something," Susan growled. NOW GET OUT OF HERE.

He spoke while her Voice scattered the etheric particles of his form, and it made his voice go tinny, like a disorganizer heard from yards away: "Oh, no. We have business to attend to, you and I." His face showed some discomfort, and he twitched his shoulders as if to ward off the heebie-jeebies he was incapable of getting.

Susan's main weapons were intimidation and the tendency to cling to an Enough Of This Nonsense attitude. When she got physical, she supposed she must give off signs that more experienced fighters could read and anticipate. So, when Susan swung her non-poker hand at Teatime's face (a trick that had worked 50 percent of the time, so it was worth one more shot), she was not unduly surprised that his own hand came up to block it.

Rather than being caught in an iron grip, Susan's wrist went through Teatime's hand; her hand went through his face.

Rather than passing through as easily as through a prism's thrown rainbow, something in Susan caught on something in Teatime and _dragged._

It was a sensation that, later, Susan could only liken to her bones' marrow pulling through cold molasses. It was not her skin that touched the ghost but rather her essence; it was not Teatime's semiphysical collection of ectoplasm and insanity that clung to her bones and slid off, leaving tendrils – it was something that felt like tenacity, purpose, and terrible focus (and just a tiny bit like saliva).

Teatime's face stretched slightly to follow the path of Susan's hand; his features seemed made of fresh taffy, and that was probably the worst thing about it, she thought. And based on what she could read of his expression, she rather thought Teatime agreed.

"I would greatly appreciate it," he said coolly as cheek and brow, gray-black glass eye, and mouth slid back into their proper places, "if you would refrain from doing that again." He blinked when everything settled and added, "That was very unpleasant."

Susan swallowed two or three responses that ranged from shrill, bestial keening to "Ha! There's more where that came from!"

She went with, "Bollocks."


End file.
